The US government has said it will increase the number of white South Africans it admits as refugees this year from about 7,500 to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation.”
Since starting his second term in office last year, Donald Trump has repeatedly made false claims that white Afrikaners are racially targeted and face a “white genocide”, which South Africa’s government has furiously rebutted.
His administration also cut aid to South Africa, boycotted the G20 summit in Johannesburg last year and disinvited South Africa from this year’s G20, which will be held at one of Trump’s resorts in Miami.
The US began admitting white South Africans as refugees in May 2025, while suspending the refugee settlement programme for people fleeing war and persecution in countries including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan. In the year ending in September 2024, the last full fiscal year before Trump took office, the US admitted more than 100,000 refugees.
On Monday, the US state department sent Congress an emergency notice, stating that it would take up to 17,500 Afrikaners as refugees in the year ending in September. In October, the government had said it would admit just 7,500 refugees in total, mainly white South Africans.
It said the cost of resettling 10,000 more white South Africans would be about $100m (£75m), according to the Associated Press, which saw a copy of the notice.
The state department said the South African government’s rhetoric “across multiple ministries and political parties has sought to undermine the US resettlement program and attacked Afrikaners”.
It also cited a South African raid of a US refugee processing centre in December, which the US government said at the time was “unacceptable”. South Africa’s government defended the action, saying that it had deported seven Kenyans who were working illegally in the country without permits.
“This escalating hostility heightens the risks to Afrikaners in South Africa, who are already subject to far-reaching government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” the state department notice said.
Afrikaners are descended from Dutch and French settlers and ruled South Africa during apartheid. They repressed the black majority, keeping them in poverty, while ensuring the white minority was safe and wealthy.
Affirmative action policies since the end of apartheid helped to create a black elite and middle class. However, more than 30 years after Nelson Mandela came to power as South Africa’s first black president, South Africa remains deeply unequal. About 12% of white South Africans are unemployed, according to official data, compared with 48% of black South Africans.
Nonetheless, “black economic empowerment” policies, along with high crime rates that affect everyone, have nurtured a feeling among some white South Africans that they are now the victims of racial discrimination.
The conspiracy theory of a white genocide has also long been a staple of the racist far right, which highlights incidents where white farmers were murdered. In recent years, this has also been amplified by the South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk and the rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson.
Associated Press contributed to this report
